This disclosure generally relates to digital imaging systems architecture and specifically relates to industrial design for machines, such as printers, copiers and other systems.
Many imaging machines have multiple devices performing the same functions, such as, for example, production presses. Production presses are often used to produce, for example, full-color books, personalized marketing brochures, financial statements and other kinds of jobs. A job is one or more sheets of media being processed together (e.g., the pages of a book) by the machine. Multiple devices performing the same functions are often available on production presses because these machines typically run at a high speed with a high volume of input and output. Production presses often have multiple devices performing the same functions, including, for example, multiple input modules (e.g., feeders), multiple output modules (e.g., stackers), and multiple finishers (e.g., booklet makers, staplers). Some machines with multiple devices performing the same functions have an auto-switch mode whereby jobs being processed by the machine are automatically distributed among the multiple devices. Furthermore, a given job may be split among multiple devices.
In the case of a job split among two or more finishers, the user (or machine operator) must retrieve the job from all the finishers, which may require tediously sorting through other jobs in multiple output trays just to find the user's job. This is especially daunting on high volume machines where it is not unusual for finishers to output 3,000 to 5,000 sheets. Currently, the user is powerless to avoid this situation. After the user submits the job, there is no feedback from the machine to tell the user to which of the multiple devices the machine assigned the job. Users of such machines do not know when a job is at risk of being split across multiple devices and there is no way to prevent it from occurring. In addition, once the job has been submitted and assigned to one or more output destinations by the system, users have no way of re-routing the job to alternate output destinations.